Finding the legal mechanisms: The UN role?

A practical question that arises concerns how to find the necessary legal mechanisms to organize, on a global scale, the needed co-operation among the various states of the world. One recognition would certainly seem to be the need for a greatly enhanced role for supranational bodies - and obviously for the United Nations and its different agencies.

Multilateral international co-operation is increasingly seen as the way to help solve the world's most burning problems. Thus, at the start of the next century, the prospect of establishing some beginnings of a world government may not necessarily appear as some sort of chimera or fantasy. Theoretical and forecasting work in this direction is therefore a task for the present time.

Future trends in international relations, both positive and negative, will depend on an array of circumstances and conditions. Certainly one sure thing will be the emergence of radically new considerations due to the rapid pace of the scientific and technological revolution. What seemed unlikely and improbable yesterday is seen as commonplace and requisite today. Looking over the horizon of the coming decade, one cannot even employ the same time-frames acceptable today. Much of what we now consider as unthinkable could, in 10 years, have become an integral part of our reality. It is thus not an overstatement to say that the entire system of international relations has entered a profoundly revolutionary stage - one obviously fraught with all kinds of surprising, but also with great potential for humankind in the next millennium.